Human knowledge is a vastly complex network of linked facts, ideas, and experiences. When one fact is thought about, many other related facts come to mind. When a person gains enough expertise, the mention of a topic can trigger that person's mind to visualize the entire mass of related information in one memory event.
According to the field of study known as fractal geometry, any object can be described or modeled by its component parts, i.e., "fractals". Knowledge is also a fractal. For example, the product line of a company that makes different types of power plants can be viewed as a collection of power plant classes, which are collections of power plants, which are collections of systems, which are collections of design specifications, which are collections of sections, which are collections of words and numerical values.
When information is stored, it is usually an attempt to record information and share it between humans. In this process, a person takes a certain piece of information and stores it with other related information, hopefully in a place where it can be found in the future. The information stored is presented in context and with a goal. For example, in the case of a design specification, an engineer is attempting to present how an item must be designed and constructed. In the context of a design specification, it is usually not appropriate for an engineer to dwell on why an engineering requirement exists or the underlying thought behind it.
To a technical expert, an engineering requirement can be considered a trigger for thought. As an expert reads a section of a design specification, that expert will visualize most of the related technical information, and what cannot be visualized or remembered, the expert knows how to retrieve. In other words, an expert knows how the specialized information in his field of technical expertise is linked.
When data is entered into storage, the fractal organization (i.e. the links) of the knowledge is destroyed. In order for another person to benefit from that stored information, it is necessary for that person to recreate some level of that organization. This is done by researching the subject matter, consulting with experts, and reviewing related material. A piece of text or block of data is of limited value without at least some of the background knowledge which supports it.
Simply storing information in a conventional computer database does not ameliorate the situation because neither relational nor object databases will link data items unless told to do so. Thus, in the context of data representation, the crux of the problem inherent in conventional computerized information storage systems is that knowledge is a fractal, whereas the data, as it is conventionally stored, is not.
Text can also be represented as a fractal organization of ideas or facts. Documents consist of paragraphs, which consist of sentences, which consist of words, which consist of characters. However, since computers are sequential processors, the natural evolution of computerized text processing followed the most technically straightforward approach: it was based upon the sequential processing of characters.
Conventional document management systems provide a number of indexing features to allow authors to describe what is in a document, so that others can locate information relevant to their needs. None of these systems, however, process text at the paragraph, sentence, or word level (as required) in order to provide the ability to directly access and link related information object by object.
In some systems, documents are broken into paragraphs which are stored in a database. These paragraphs are then used in a number of different documents, as appropriate. This is an example of what could be termed a three-dimensional system. The first dimension is a "text object", or paragraph. The second dimension is a collection of paragraphs, which would manifest itself as a section or document. If the one-dimensional text objects are used in more than one document at a time, the system could be considered three-dimensional. Such a three-dimensional system allows the multiple use of single text objects, which is a tremendous productivity tool at the authoring and publishing stages.
Some systems also allow for version control at the document level, which in a limited sense could be considered the fourth dimension. These would not be true four-dimensional systems because version control in and of itself only records "snap shots" of the state of a document at discrete points along the time continuum. As each version is released, a snap shot of the system configuration is recorded. Immediately following a version release, the database is by definition out of date with the latest thinking of its contributors.